Random Rules: Dean Wareham

The shuffler: Dean Wareham, the former
leader of indie-rock featherweight champs Galaxie 500 and Luna. Wareham's
current project is Dean & Britta, a team-up with his wife and ex-Luna
bandmate Britta Phillips; their latest album, Back Numbers,was released last year. The
duo also scored Noah Baumbach's 2005 film The Squid And The Whale. Wareham's first book, a
memoir titled Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, comes out in March.

Mavis Staples, "A House Is Not A Home"

Dean Wareham: I think this is off the
first solo record she did for Stax. It's a very sad song. "A house is not a
home when no one's there." Actually, I like the early Staple Singers more, the
real gospel-y stuff.

The A.V. Club: Pops Staples and his crazy
reverb guitar.

DW: Yeah, the reverb and tremolo. It was an influence
on a couple other guitar players I like, Sandy Bull and, oh, "Mr. Tambourine
Man," what's his name. You can look it up. [Laughs.] Wait, Bruce Langhorne. He
played with Dylan. I think he's missing a finger on one of his hands as well. That
can be a good thing, an impediment.

AVC: How so?

DW: Well, it forces you to play in kind of a simple,
rhythmic style.

AVC: Tony Iommi is missing the tips of a couple
fingers.

DW: Is he?I didn't know he had something wrong with his
fingers. Oh, and Django Reinhardt. I don't know who else is missing a finger.

AVC: In general, are you a fan of gospel?

DW: I don't know a huge amount. My favorite gospel
band is probably Spacemen 3. White British guys doing gospel music. I know they
were really into The Staple Singers as well.

Nino Rota, "Theme From Fellini Satyricon"

DW: I'm not that familiar with this one, though I do
love Nino Rota. I like soundtracks, but there's hardly anyone working today who
I like. We do a bit of film-scoring, Britta and I. Oh, and I love [Ennio]
Morricone. I saw him at Radio City Music Hall last year. He had, like, a hundred-piece
choir and a big orchestra. It was a great night. Before he came out, some guy
came on the PA system and said, "This is the most magical night in New York
history." [Laughs.] But it was good. Then some guy walked out onto the
stage—no one was quite sure what Morricone looked like—and everyone
applauded. But it was just the guy bringing out the sheet music and putting it
on the stands.

AVC: What did you have in mind when you scored The
Squid And The Whale?

DW: Well, you have things in mind, but they don't
always work. We started out taking pieces of classical music and we played them
on synthesizers, inspired by A Clockwork Orange. That didn't really work,
so we threw that idea out. We just sat down and watched. We tried not to be
offensive. So much music in films is really offensive these days, beating you
on the head, telling you what to think.

B. Fleischmann, "A Letter From Home"

DW: Fleischmann means "butcher." He's Austrian. I
don't listen to a lot of electronica, but I like some Fleischmann. I think
instrumental records like this are wallpaper. When a producer I really
like—like William Orbit, who I think is great—makes a solo record,
I'm like, "Eh." It's better when he has Madonna to write some songs for.

The Staple Singers, "I Wish I Had Answered"

DW: We've already talked about them. [Laughs.]

AVC: Do you think it's interesting how old pop
artists like The Staple Singers changed their sound and message to fit the
times?

DW: I think back then, they were trying to write hits
all the time, you know? There was probably more pressure to do that, where now
there are so many more records being made by so many more people. They're
putting them out, and only 100 people might like it.

AVC: Have you ever felt pressure like that,
particularly during Luna?

DW: There was pressure at Elektra. There was always
someone saying, "What's the radio hit single going to be on this record? If you
don't have a hit this time, we're going to drop you." They said that for about
four albums, and then one day they were right. [Laughs.] But we were actually
kind of fortunate. We had to go back and remix a song or something; that was
the worst we ever had to do. You hear horror stories, awful things happening to
bands.

AVC: Is your book going to be mostly about your
bands, or will it be more of a personal thing?

DW: Well, it's both. It's a look at what it's like to
be in a band, and the business, and what was going on in the record industry as
a whole through the '90s. The grunge years, and then the Britney and 'N Sync
years. And then rock came back again, and all of a sudden, CD sales began to
plummet. There's that story—it's cultural, like urban
anthropology—but it's also deeply personal.

AVC: Do you talk at all about your favorite
music by other artists?

DW: Definitely. I talk about when I first heard
certain bands, certain songs. There's stuff from my early childhood, like The
Seekers doing "Georgy Girl," or seeing Elvis Presley on TV when I was 10 years
old. There's also a bit about being in New York City in the late '70s for the
punk explosion. I was a big Clash fan. I remember seeing The Clash at Bond's;
it's a bit of a legendary series of shows. More legendary because the fire
department came in after the first night and declared that the show was
dangerously oversold. So The Clash tripled the amount of shows they were doing
there. This was the Sandinista! tour, by the way, so some group was handing out
literature about Nicaragua in the lobby. Grandmaster Flash were opening, and
they got booed off the stage with chants of "disco sucks" and "nigger." It was
really horrible. It was strange to see the difference between The Clash and their
meathead fans.

AVC: What did you think of Grandmaster Flash at
the time?

DW: Oh, I liked it. What was it, "The Message"? That
was a great song. I wasn't deep into that stuff, but I liked it.

Kaleidoscope, "Kaleidoscope"

DW: There were two bands called Kaleidoscope,
actually, an English one and an American one. Both were psychedelic bands, but
I prefer the English one. This song is just called "Kaleidoscope." It's a song
about themselves. [Laughs.] They do, like, eight-minute epics about fairies and
sky children and the turtle king. I love that band. It's hard to find their
stuff now. Actually, that's not true. You can find everything now, can't you?
It's all out there. I think that's the big difference between now and, say,
1984. If you wanted to find Velvet Underground records back then, it was very
difficult. They were out of print. But now, everything that ever came out is in
print, and it's somewhere in the warehouse of Amazon.

AVC: Do you think that's changed the way people
interact with music?

DW: It's a different world we live in. I read Simon
Reynolds' book last year; have you read that?

AVC: Rip It Up And Start Again?

DW: Yeah. He kind of makes the point that music is now
everywhere. People walk around with their iPods on all the time. It's
everywhere, and yet it's more of a background activity than anything else. I
think now, most people come home and sit in front of the computer; that's what
they do all night long. "I've got all these songs, and I'm going to store them
on my iPod." Still, it seems less of a central activity in peoples' lives. They
don't eagerly await some new record and then go home and sit down and listen to
it.